The darknesses June 7, 2013

 


 

As much as she has revealed about herself through her poetry over the last year, some darkness still haunts her, and I hope this is not me.

I still resist concept that some of her more recent poems are directed at me, or that after eight months, I remain the boogie man in her closet, someone she has come to hate so thoroughly, just the mere mention of my name causes her to freak out.

The mood swings in her poetry are dramatic, from the intensely sweet love stuff she started out with in the new year, to a much darker and scarier landscape in her most recent poems.

Of course, I don’t expect her to shift from the intense hatred she expresses prior to her resignation from our office last October to a shrug of shoulders in less than a year, but I suspect there has to be some moderation – although several poems hint of a “let bygones be bygones” philosophy, which I no more trust than if she posted a poem full of roses and chocolates.

Several of her last poems I might attribute to mood swings, only she’s too talented and a deliberate poet to change so dramatically in such a short space of time.

And yet, these apparent mood swings come so regularly, it is difficult to understand what motivates them, since such things generally occur as a result of what happen to her in her everyday life, and since I play no part in that, it’s a mystery as to why she would consider me a threat or darkness.

If not me, then what makes up the darknesses in her most recent poem?

Over the last three months, a pattern of sorts appears in her poetry, abrupt changes from desperation to hope, then to hopelessness, and then to resolve to accept her fate in the most recent poems.

These two terrible (yet remarkably well-crafted poems) seem to paint her as a sociopath – dragging me back to the poem about fair and unfair and trickling up.

And yet as innocent as I ache to paint her (the little girl seeking love in all the wrong faces), she still comes across as a street-savvy person, who is constantly confronted by the reality of her situation. There is a pause, then a slight backtracking as she claims she is on her knees again, but unlike the past, she accepts this circumstance in this so-called brighter and move loving space, a kind of wishful thinking, I think, somehow seeking to soften the harsh reality of her existence, and these poems seem like the aftermath of her love affair, reflecting her intense disappointment, and perhaps a more significant hope that she might put an end to the depressing cycle that seems to have dominated her life (by end I mean positive rather than the rooftop thing – or the scarier concept of her phoenix poem in which she would take her opponent (me perhaps) down with her, if she goes.

But I have no doubt she expects to rise from the ashes again, even if she hasn’t yet figured out how.

She appears to be painting a happy face on an otherwise bleak picture.

But for whom?

Is she trying to convince herself that things aren’t quite as bad as they seem?

But then, in her most recent poem, she seems to take that back.

More on that idea tomorrow.

 

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